3. The Headcrab Zombies Are Even More Terrifying Than You Thought
Zombies in video games are a dime a dozen, even before Resident Evil made them the villain du jour for every survival horror, first person shooter and typing simulator going. Half-Life provided a cool spin on the usual shambling hoards by mashing up the undead with the xenomorphs from Alien, having the innocent bystanders of Black Mesa and beyond possessed by the facehugger-alike headcrabs who afix themselves to people's bonces and reduce them to terrifying, flesh eating monsters. Pretty scary! Well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Sure, turning the corner and running into a bunch of those headcrab zombies is pretty scary in and of itself, but digging into the source code reveals even more terrifying secrets about the most iconic of Half-Life monsters. If you pitch up the moans of the zombines - that is, the headcrabs who've latched onto Combine forces - they're actually yelling "Biotics... overrun... infestation... move... target... contact!" Even more chilling, however, is the discovery that the moans of the headcrab zombie scientists from the original games are actually reversed howls of torment, a guttural screaming of the pleas "Oh God... God help me!" Listen and try sleeping soundly after that's taken hold of your unconscious mind.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
